An influential panel of US Senators is investigating whether President Barack Obama's administration gave filmmakers excessive access to information on the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

The Senate intelligence committee is to examine contact between government officials and the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, a major Hollywood take on the mission to find the late al-Qaeda chief.

Kathryn Bigelow, the film's director, and Mark Boal, its screenwriter, are known to have been assisted by officials with intimate knowledge of the raid on bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan in May 2011.

Stationed in a covert base overseas, Jessica Chastain (centre) plays a member of the elite team of spies and military operatives who secretly devoted themselves to finding Osama Bin Laden in Columbia Pictures' electrifying new thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty

Senators will consider whether Bigelow and Boal were provided with "inappropriate" access to confidential information, a source familiar with the inquiry told the Reuters news agency.

Documents released last year under freedom of information laws showed that they met Michael Morell, then the deputy director of the CIA and its acting chief since the resignation of David Petraeus.

In one document Ben Rhodes, a senior aide to Mr Obama, said officials briefed the pair "with the full knowledge and full approval/support" of Leon Panetta, then CIA director and now Defence Secretary.

Senators are also believed to be examining whether the film's much-criticised scenes depicting the torture of terrorist suspects were encouraged or informed by government officials.

US director Kathryn Bigelow

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the intelligence committee's chairman, last month complained to Sony, the film's producers, that it falsely suggested intelligence gained via torture had led the US to bin Laden.

They had an "obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film's fictional narrative," she said.